


19x19 Things That Never Happened

by rageprufrock



Category: Hikaru no Go
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 03:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/882444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A number of things that never happened to Shindou Hikaru and Touya Akira. (Abandoned.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	19x19 Things That Never Happened

**1\. “Go! plays Nameless Highland Saturday night staring at 10:30—this veteran group has been through more ups and downs than Bad Luck, but they put on an unforgettable live show—not to be missed. 1000¥ @ the door.”**

Under the heavy light of a small stage, even Touya Akira must admit that Shindou is mesmerizing, head lowered and eyes closed, hands smoothed over the strings of a guitar. When Touya had first heard him sing nearly seven years ago he heard raw, untrained prodigy—now, Shindou’s voice as deepened into rolling thunder, rich and powerful—captivating.

And so the crowd is heaving and the energy is palpable, and when Touya touches the palm of his hand to the side of the speaker he almost feels a literal rumble of Shindou’s voice down his spine, mouth and tongue and teeth licking across his skin.

“He’s really incredible,” Waya mutters, but with the self-deprecating affection of a long-time friend, eyes fond.

And Touya, though he has not always been extraordinary, has always known how to recognize it. His father was a classical pianist and some of Touya’s first memories are laced with the faint, whispering sounds of a piano. He has always known music, but the day he met Shindou was the day music finally seeped in through his skin, itched beneath the surface, struggled to break free. Touya makes Shindou yell, and his fingers moving across the white and black keys of a piano make those shouts melt into melody in something akin to a miracle.

So for the moment, Touya and Waya and Isumi are putzing around on stage, gulping down water and admiring the line of Shindou’s shoulders, backlit in the blinding overhead spotlights and seeing the shadowed faces of three hundred people in too small a space.

“He’s made a lot of improvements,” Touya compromises, because he may say it to himself and Shindou may hear it when their passing glances meet, but he’ll be dead before he’s caught complimenting Shindou’s music.

Isumi smirks. “Enough to get him onto the covers of four magazines.”

“Two of which were rags,” Waya emphasizes, bitter.

They all know that in two weeks, four magazines will be the least of it—in two weeks, they are announcing their first nationwide tour and their first Tokyo live house as an officially-signed band, with the backing and money and ravenous ambition of Institute Records.

In the five years since they have been playing together, Shindou has lived up to his name and captured the attentions of people all over the country. This club and their lives are so far away from those first, shaky days when Shindou sang like a ragdoll angel, and didn’t seem to care about the words. Touya still remembers their fights, then, how Shindou said it didn’t matter—maybe he’d submit himself to the approval of a talent agency and let them place him somewhere, make heaps of money. Touya has never understood how somebody with the passion and drive of Shindou Hikaru ever let the thought cross his mind.

“Ah, but two more rags than any of us have been on,” Isumi says, rueful but amused.

Isumi clearly has no interest in becoming famous, and while riotously inebriated (at which point he becomes a weepy and philosophical drunk), Waya has time and again expressed an unusually pronounced fear that one day Isumi will realize that he’s beautiful and smart and leave Waya to live a normal life, bury his bass under a mountain of medical books and go to TouDai like his test scores said he could. Waya and Isumi have known each other two years longer than even Shindou and Touya, and honestly, Touya just doesn’t want to know.

“Yet we let him have a solo,” Waya grouses, but smiles. “But I have to say, I love this song.”

Touya only nods distractedly, because he’s seen this song from the moment the words started rolling into Shindou’s head—four months after he stopped singing, gave up music, became desperately depressed, and then pulled his head out of his ass and stopped looking suicidal all the time—to the initial chords that Shindou played loosely to flesh out the melody. It’s haunting and bittersweet and grateful, like he’s singing to an old lover or a best friend, the delineation between the two—if Waya and Isumi are any indication—being very blurry.

“He really means it,” Isumi murmurs.

“And he still won’t tell us who it’s about,” Waya complains, but shuffles back behind the drumset, settling down into his seat and tugging at the collar of his camo t-shirt just as the last, lingering notes of Shindou’s voice echoed through the room.

That had bothered Touya, too, until Shindou had promised him an answer somewhere in the distant future. And at the time, the lack of a time limit on collection was strangely thrilling, like an unspoken agreement to play off of one another forever, to ride on each other’s melodies as long as they possibly could.

“Hey, grand finale—and then we have to face the proverbial music.”

Isumi did a fair job of hiding his discomfort; Touya mostly grinned. Their manager—a perpetually cheerful man fresh out of college—Ashiwara and Ogata—the chain-smoking, smoky-eyed record company executive who’d signed them (though Touya had an uncomfortable suspicion that he’d been attempting to sign Shindou for more than just his talent on stage)—had expressly forbidden them to play any more independent gigs before their new contract was announced.

But then they’d never played by rules they hadn’t respected, anyway. And Shindou had wanted one last time, in a small, intimate place, where he could feel the beginnings of his music, where his hands fell and how it was to be on stage without make up and a tech crew, just their band and their voices.

Waya had to shout over the roaring crowd when he said, “Ogata’s going to roast us.”

“Ogata-san isn’t that bad,” Touya argued, moving away toward the piano, adjusting a microphone.

“Well,” Waya compromised, “anyway, Ashiwara-san will just pout at him and Ogata will just give him that fish-eyed look and let him get away with murder, anyway.”

And as the cheering died down and Shindou turned back toward his bandmates, grinning wildly and mouthing, Are we ready? Do we want to do this?, Touya heard Isumi tell Waya, “I honestly think that he only wears the white suit and gold chains because Ashiwara-san wants him to, Waya,” and Waya muttering, “‘Cause everybody wants to look like they pimp young boys.”

Touya smirked and brought his hands down on the keys, locking eyes with Shindou for a minute before he struck a fast, ruthless melody and said, “If you think you can keep up.”

It made Shindou’s eyes sparkle as his laughter melted into the opening lines of the last song in their last set as free agents, the last song of the night, and after Isumi’s baseline thrum and the anticipatory rumble of Waya’s drums joined in, they could barely think it was so loud on the stage, but Touya felt what Shindou was saying—he’d never needed the words anyway.

**2\. “In more traditional news, Yumi-chan is happy to report that Igo-idol, Shindou Hikaru turns seventeen next Thursday! And to celebrate, Shindou-san will be playing Touya Akira (rival, or more??) in the first game of the Meijin elimination matches that afternoon—lets send our best wishes to both these bright stars!! Go for it, Shindou-san!”**

“Would you move already?” came a voice, terse and irate and a little off-center, which Touya, with the knowledge of six plus years of rivalry read as: I’m not feeling very well, it may actually be causing me pain to sit upright, I want hot tea and for you to get hit by a car.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, and slapped down a white stone, because he knew better than to pick a fight when Shindou looked like that.

About three years ago, his father had asked him how was his game with Shindou, and Touya had answered “Not great—she’s on her period.” His parents had both gone silent. It wasn’t that Touya had done anything as stupid as ask, but when somebody was off for four days a month, every month, at the same time every month, anybody who’d gotten a halfway decent peek at a human health textbook would know what was going happening.

Shindou scowled and pushed a strand of her streaked-brown hair behind one ear, from which there were dangling silver earrings, which jangled together like the bangles on her thin wrists and distracted Touya when she played a hand. The bangles and the earrings were new, of course she hadn’t had them when she was eleven, but she was seventeen now and a sunny, trendy Go-pro who was pretty much single-handedly responsible for the mobbing crowd of insei boys at the doors of the Go Institute every week.

“You can stop acting so scared of me,” she snapped. “I’m not going to bite you.”

“You’re not going to beat me, either,” Touya said tartly. He had no idea why, but whereas he was usually damned by politeness when it came to the opposite gender, he couldn’t get himself to even fake it for Shindou.

“Hah—we’ll see,” she promised darkly.

Twenty minutes and two shouting matches later, it was decided that Touya won by half a moku, that Shindou was utterly exhausted, and—this was decided by the larger population of old men in the Go salon who treated Shindou like some sort of living goddess—that Touya needed to see her home, given that it had started raining while they were shouting imprecations at one another.

Which brought Touya to the train station, where he realized again how poorly-matched he and Shindou looked, standing next to one another on the platform. She was looking up, eyes narrowing at the rain that poured down through the twilight, hair falling away from her pretty, smooth face, which looked ghostly in the street lights and shadows.

Shindou liked to wear things that made her look as if she’d just stepped off of the cover of a fashion magazine, and in fact, had been asked to pose, idol-style, with an assortment of Go-themed items in a magazine not six months ago. But the resulting uproar and attention had made her swear off any future ventures in that direction, and Touya, though watching her wear ridiculous hats and disguises to go outside was funny, agreed that it was probably the best possible decision. (Touya, on the other hand, was wearing khaki slacks—perfectly creased—and a shirt the same color blue as his eyes, neatly tucked in.) They were getting bewildered looks from a few of the teenaged boys who were wearing clothing as trendy as Shindou’s current denim skirt and bubbly sneakers, her scissor-modified green sweatshirt, the mardi-gras beads she had looped around her neck, and her pale, cream-colored hat, which Touya wanted to touch one day, because it looked very soft over her hair.

“You really don’t have to walk me home,” Shindou said, sounding halfway embarrassed. “Those guys at the parlor just like ribbing you, you know.”

Touya smiled. “You don’t have an umbrella, Shindou,” he reminded her.

Her eyes widened. “I could too have—”

“Do you?” he interrupted.

She frowned. “No,” she admitted. “But I could.”

“I’m sure you could,” Touya said, placating, and cast a sideways glance, at where the stares from the teenaged boys hadn’t been averted to a more profitable direction. He couldn’t help the swell of irritation; it wasn’t that he didn’t know that he looked ridiculous with her, but it also wasn’t as if he was about to take her into his arms and re-enact the pages out of Shindou’s shoujo manga, either. Besides, he and Shindou were rivals, which shared only three letters with “lovers” and involved a great deal less shouting and sulking than dating seemed to, if Touya’s admittedly cursory inspection of the practice had yielded any truth.

Wind gusted as the train pulled into the station, and Shindou shivered in her skirt before they climbed into the car, sitting down side by side, squished together in the neither empty nor particularly crowded compartment, thighs pressed together so that Touya could feel the knobby bone of her knee. Shindou didn’t seem to care much, which only provided further evidence of Touya’s mounting suspicion that Shindou didn’t even see him as a boy.

It was late April, and soon it’d be early May, when Shindou was going to hare off to parts unknown to grieve horribly. Touya always got an uncomfortable shiver when he remembered her quitting Go, just when she was ready to face him across a board. Touya had been so angry with her then he’d stormed her school library, which had only made Shindou furious the due to the rumors that began circulating immediately about her new boyfriend—the one with the pretty face and the pageboy haircut. (To his knowledge, they’d never really died out, and Touya admitted that the fact that they kept getting photographed together in the gossip pages of the local rags while coming out of various places where they’d just had very loud arguments about Go probably didn’t help the matter any.)

There were several reigning theories about why exactly Shindou mourned on Boy’s Day, the most popular of them being that she’d been dumped then, but Touya thought that it must be something much worse than that, to make her eyes dim the way they did. And she’d promised to tell him about Sai someday, and he made promises to himself that he wouldn’t worry about it too much, because whoever Sai was, he wasn’t her Go.

“It has to be that her boyfriend died,” Waya always contended. Though Touya was never included in these discussions—largely because Waya vocally disliked him and seemed not a little jealous that Shindou spent more time with Touya than her former insei friends—he sometimes overheard them, because Waya had a tendency to gossip in the men’s room.

“I don’t think we should talk about it,” Isumi would demure. “It’s not very fair to her.”

Mostly, though, the sustained mystery of Shindou Hikaru was just that. She was respected for her Go, watched by upper-dans for mysterious reasons—though Touya thought that Ogata-san’s watchful eyes were a little less mysterious and more lecherous than the others—and she was Touya’s rival, when she wasn’t living as ordinary a teenaged life as possible when one was a professional Go player.

“Next stop,” Shindou said, standing up and tugging at her skirt for a moment. Touya stood up next to her, and unsnapped the cord around the umbrella. The first time Shindou had seen how Touya aligned the folds of his umbrella perfectly, she’d nearly fallen off a chair laughing.

“I’m only about four blocks away from the station,” she said apologetically as the train pulled to a stop, “sorry about making you come all this way.”

Shindou lived in a quiet, flat suburb, with houses crowded all together and trees behind walls, laundry fluttering in back yards. Touya liked it for how it was so different than his sprawling, traditional residence, and he liked that it was perfectly Shindou, alive and eclectic and warm.

“It’s fine,” he reassured her, and they stepped out onto the mostly-deserted platform, taking a left and pausing while Touya shook open his umbrella.

“Whatever you do,” Shindou warned with a low growl, ducking underneath the umbrella and scowling as they trudged out into the night, “don’t listen to my mom, though. She’s going to go totally nuts over this.”

Touya smirked.

Which only made Shindou turn and unnatural shade of red and squawk, “It’s not funny, Touya!”

“I think it’s funny,” Touya said meanly.

Shindou covered her face with her hands, scowling at him through her spread fingers. “It’s the opposite of funny, Touya! She—she wants us to get married and have—she said this last week over dinner—over dinner—beautiful grandchildren for her!”

Touya didn’t laugh, but it was hard.

He knew very well what Shindou’s mom thought, and more than that, he knew exactly what everybody in the Go world thought. They were, to most of the professional circuit, a foregone conclusion, they showed up together and left in conjunction, they had loud, public arguments and private disagreements, and Touya never treated Shindou with anything less than a comfortable familiarity and total professional respect. On his last birthday Ashiwara and Ogata had ganged up on him and purchased him condoms and a pretentious book with flowery advice about sex, at least half of which Touya’s research on health websites proved to be untrue. His father had to be persuaded not to invite his so-called in-laws over for dinner on a monthly basis, and asked about that “pretty Shindou girl” every other day, who’d so kindly visited him in the hospital. Touya’s mother sighed at photographs of Shindou she saw in newspapers and in Go Weekly, commenting on what a lovely, lively girl she was, and giving Touya long, approving smiles.

But he wasn’t about to admit to any of that.

“Beautiful. Grandchildren,” Shindou emphasized. “Are you hearing this?”

“I have perfect hearing, Shindou,” Touya said, and maneuvered them around a puddle, because Shindou was now far too involved in wailing to the drizzling sky about how if this went on, she’d have to run away from home.

“This isn’t funny,” she warned. “That night you and me and Yashirou were getting ready for the Hokuto tournament?”

Touya remembered the way Shindou had looked, passed out on the living room floor, because Yashirou had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown at the suggestion of two boys and a girl holed up in Touya’s bedroom all night. Her hair had been mussed and her face had been flushed and she’d been wearing a long, gray knit dress over a white shirt, and she’d been barefoot, disoriented from sleep when he’d finally shaken her back to consciousness and said it was four in the morning, shouldn’t she go home?

“She almost called your parents to arrange a wedding because she said you’d soiled my innocence. And she sounded happy, okay? It’s not funny,” she finished direly.

Touya nearly choked.

“Hah!” Shindou said triumphantly. “You see?”

“We’re at your house,” Touya said, mostly because he didn’t want her to see his flush.

He’d been blushing around her more and more. It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered the possibility that he might like her as more than a rival—and how could he not consider it, with all the rumor and innuendo flying around and his totally uncooperative parents—it was only that he didn’t know what to do if he did. What would he say? What would he do? Would they still play, or would that disrupt the relationship? And also, would they have sex? Because at seventeen, Touya could admit to having sex on his mind just about anytime he wasn’t thinking about Go and a lot of the times he was—which meant Shindou blurred the boundaries in a really uncomfortable way.

“This sucks,” Shindou muttered at her gate, struggling with the rusted lock. “If I were a boy, none of this would have happened.”

She paused as the metal finally creaked open, and she and Touya picked their way in carefully. She brightened as they approached her door. “Maybe we can tell people I’m your cousin!”

Touya stared at her, though, the profile of her pretty face in the orange light of her house, the way the skirt smoothed down her thighs and the green sweatshirt, and how it dipped off of one white shoulder. He tried to lay over that image the same bright, animated face of a boy, with brown and blond streaks in his hair, too, the same loud laughter and big voice for when he fought with Touya. He’d wear trendy jeans and trendy t-shirts, and they’d still mismatch, but at least nobody would be planning their wedding.

But Touya saw all of it and realized he’d still want her—him, whoever, as long as it was Shindou Hikaru with a bright smile and a bright future and those unpredictable, beautiful hands of Go.

“I don’t think it’d change anything,” Touya said softly.

And Shindou paused where she was pulling her keys out of her purse, turning to blink at him with curious, silvery eyes. “Really?” she asked, surprised. “I mean, isn’t that incest?”

He didn’t have time to scowl and yell about how she never knew what he was talking about before he heard the enthusiastic footsteps of Mrs. Shindou and the front door flying open to reveal her, cherry-cheeked and excited as all the blood drained out of Shindou’s face.

“How sweet of you to walk her home in this weather, Touya-kun!” Shindou’s mom cooed; Shindou looked like she was suffering a heart attack. “Really—you must come in.”

“Mom!” Shindou hissed, eyes darting desperately between Touya and her mother.

“Your parents are still in China, right?” her mother continued, oblivious, while Touya felt his cheeks redden.

“I—” he started.

“Is dad home?” Shindou asked desperately. Shindou’s father hated Touya and had ever since he’d decided that Touya had seduced his baby daughter at the unforgivable age of eleven. Just as well, since it was probably the only reason he and Shindou hadn’t been engaged like something out of a horrible romantic comedy already.

“You probably haven’t had a good meal in days—I’ve just made dinner,” Mrs. Shindou said, ignoring her daughter. “You should stay.”

“Mom!” Shindou shrieked, red as a tomato. “He’s got to go home, right?” she shouted, looking at Touya for confirmation.

“Right,” he agreed passively.

“You see?” Shindou demanded. “Besides, he probably eats like a pig—”

“I do not!”

“—and then I’ll end up starving and wasting away!” she protested.

“Don’t be silly, Hikaru,” her mother said distractedly, reaching out and tugging the umbrella forcibly out of Touya’s hands.

The house looked warm through the doorway, and the food smelled wonderful, he was tempted to beam and talk about how wonderful it was to be part of the family, just to see if Shindou would actually vomit a lung like she was always threatening would happen.

“I always make too much food, and from the looks of it, Touya-kun doesn’t eat enough, anyway.”

“Oh, God,” Shindou moaned as Touya stepped into the house. “Akari’s never going to let me live this down. It’s over. It’s all over.”

“Don’t be silly, Hikaru,” her mother reproached, pushing her daughter into the house with much more familiar hands than she had with Touya, frowning and saying, “Aren’t you always complaining about how you wish you had more time to play Touya-kun?”

Shindou opened her mouth, but no sounds came out, and Touya mercifully pretended not to see the way her face had darkened still in color.

“You’ll have dinner,” Shindou’s mom went on, smiling, “and then you two can play.”

Shindou sighed in resignation, and looked, shy and from beneath her long lashes at Touya, who caught her embarrassed expression.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I did warn you.”

Touya shook his head, toeing out of his shoes, watching Shindou’s mother bustle into the kitchen.

“It’s fine,” he answered, and grinned . “She’s right, you know.”

Shindou blinked. “About what?”

“We’ll have dinner,” Touya said easily. “And then we’ll play.”

The smile that appeared on Shindou’s face, Touya decided, would be familiar in any incarnation, as comfortable and necessary as her hands floating above a goban. And later, when the rain deepened into a storm, they sat on the floor of her room and played long into the night, game after game, until Shindou leaned back against her bed and her eyes closed, legs curled up underneath her.

Barring all other things, the noise that seemed to build up around them, their Go made sense, Touya decided, and that was what was most important. He stood up, feeling his knees creak, and leaned over Shindou, brushing three tentative fingers over the very soft cloth of her white cap.

If there were to be beautiful grandchildren, then there would be, he thought wryly, but first, above all, there’d be beautiful Go, and there were no questions there, no uncertainty at all.

3\. “Go Weekly reporters have discovered that Touya Koyo recently acquired a genuine Shuusaku board, one on which he played hundreds of imperial games. Generously, Touya Meijin has agreed to put it on display in the Institute lobby later this month, where it will remain through May.”

The goban is probably the most expensive thing in his grandfather’s shed, and accordingly, Shindou takes it to an antique dealer the very next day to hock it—thinking while lugging the enormously heavy block down the street that his parents were being totally unreasonable.

The dealer is astounded by the board in a way that Shindou finds kind of disturbing, considering it’s, you know, wood, with lines on it. But the way the antique store owner babbles about “appraisal” and “historic” and “priceless” makes Shindou see Yen signs in front of his eyes, and he says, “I just wanted to get a quote,” instead of his original plan, which was, “Look, I’ll take whatever you can give me for it.”

Shindou’s not a particularly good child most of the time, but he’s no moron.

So he lugs the wooden board back into his room at home and eats his dinner with a pronouncedly more cheerful outlook than before, and listens to his parents’ good-natured lectures about how they’re sorry to have to take away his allowance, but his grades have been terrible this month. He nods at all the appropriate times and doesn’t say a word about how he’s got a priceless hunk of what’s apparently Kaya in his room. It’s a good secret, he decides, and strokes his hand over this new, proverbial piggy bank before he goes to bed, and feels the groves on its surface, probably aged from wear and use and whole lifetimes.

When Hikaru sleeps that night, he thinks he hears somebody trying to speak to him, but he’s too tired and the night is deep, so he just rolls over and dreams on.

Three weeks later, the antique dealer calls and says that there is an interested—”Very interested”—buyer on the line, willing to pay a truly staggering amount of money for the board. This makes Shindou feel the beginning stirrings of guilt, because it’s one thing to know that there’s a large sum of money coming to you, it’s quite another to know that you’re getting it because you robbed your own grandfather and aren’t going to be able to split the earnings with him.

Shindou says, “Let me think about it.”

When he goes to his grandfather and admits what he did, he gets lectured, scolded, and eventually coddled by his grandmother, who hates his grandfather’s shed, anyway, and couldn’t care less if Shindou wanted to make a good buck off of getting rid of dusty crap.

“Anyway,” his grandfather says finally. “It’s Shuusaku’s board. Find out who the buyer is—I’m not going to let somebody who doesn’t deserve it have it.”

This brings up a dilemma, considering Shindou doesn’t know who Shuusaku is, and isn’t really inclined to find out, but he feels pretty bad already about burgling his grandfather, so he asks his history teacher instead of whining about research. It turns out that Shuusaku was some big Go legend, head honcho—they named a whole title after him; it also turns out that the person who wants to buy Shuusaku’s old, Shindou’s current, his grandfather’s ex goban is some guy named Touya Koyo.

“Who’s that?” Shindou asked, mouth full of ramen.

“I don’t know, Hikaru,” his mother said distractedly. “Why don’t you call and ask your grandfather.”

So Shindou does, and then there’s even more shouting, but it’s the excited kind, and a few days after that, he’s being forced to meet some stodgy old guy who makes a living playing Go. Shindou tries really hard but realizes that he’s physically incapable of thinking of anything he’d rather do less than play Go all the time—the game makes his history class seem thrilling in comparison, makes Akari asking him if he wants to go to the school festival sound cool.

It turns out that Touya Koyo has a son Shindou’s age, who has come along because he wants to gape like the pansy loser he looks like at the goban, which has now been cleaned and smoothed and wiped down. Touya Akira has girly hair and girly shorts and girly hands.

“It’s a beautiful board—I’m surprised you’re willing to part with it,” Touya Koyo says.

Hikaru’s grandfather laughs. “Not at all. No one in my family is as worthy of it as you.”

“None of you play?” Touya Akira asks, astounded.

“No,” Shindou says, and because he can’t help it, adds, “I go outside.”

Touya scowls at him. Shindou guesses that means Touya Akira’s all right after all.

“Go is a good game,” Touya Akira insists.

“Soccer’s better,” Shindou shoots back.

Neither of the adults are paying attention to them so Touya says, “Fine—prove it.”

This turns out badly later that week when Shindou helps Touya limp into Shindou’s house with both of his knees bloody and one elbow skinned. Shindou’s mother shrieks like they’re dying or something and yells at Shindou for half an hour for not going easy on his new friend.

Shindou figures it’s pure payback when two weeks and a lot of band-aids later Touya says, “No, no, you have to play sitting seiza” when they meet up at Touya’s for a game. They compare injuries, but Shindou still says that Touya’s being a pansy, and that having to have both legs sawed off from loss of blood flow from sitting seiza for over an hour is much, much worse than have scabby knees.

Despite knowing better, this goes on, and over time this means that Touya actually gets a tan, because he goes outside sometimes with Shindou, and that Shindou learns how to play a fairly good game of go, even if Touya is always going to whip him. Nobody gets why they’re friends, and Shindou doesn’t think too much about it, but he’s always happy to drag Touya out of his big, quiet house or the dark, quiet go salon and into the sunlight if necessary. The tradeoff is that Touya somehow knows all the answers to Shindou’s homework problems. Of course, getting caught at half past eleven on the phone bugging Touya to do his geometry isn’t winning either of them points with their parents, but Shindou knows Touya’s his most presentable friend, and that his mom’s not going to complain about the guy who always visits with a gift and has perfect manners.

Sometimes, Shindou goes to Touya’s impressive and scary house and they play go on the board that let them meet each other, and Shindou feels like he’s missing something here, a piece or a past or a history that he hasn’t been paying enough attention to—but then Touya yells at him for spacing out and Shindou starts to yell back.

They’re friends, Shindou guesses, in a way that he’s not friends with anybody else he’s known, because Touya is totally different than anybody else Shindou has ever known. Touya keeps his hair in a pageboy even though he knows it makes him look kind of girly. Touya plays Go and when he was thirteen, started to do it for a living (which Shindou figured meant that Touya should buy him stuff, like ramen, but found that Touya disagreed with this). Touya never drinks and doesn’t go to high school and doesn’t kiss girls, either—but he kisses Shindou.

It’s when they’re both seventeen, and Shindou is more exhausted than he’s ever been between cram schools and realizing that maybe everybody had a point when they said he needed to have studied more when he was in middle school. He’s midway through a rant about how if he’d been any good at Go he’d never have to do this and then every university in Japan could just go straight to hell when Touya leans over and covers Shindou’s mouth with his own.

The kiss is weird and kind of bad but nice, in an awkward way, and Shindou isn’t compelled to immediately pound Touya for being queer—because who was Touya kidding, he was kind of obvious and Shindou had figured it out pretty early—so he thinks maybe it’s a sign.

“Play a game with me?” Touya says, breathless when they break apart.

Shindou stares. “What?” he asks, because that is the level at which he is functioning now.

“A game,” Touya repeats. “Play with me.”

“God, that sounds really wrong in this context,” Shindou whines, but he pulls out the goban, because even though he’s not that great, he’s not particularly bad, and Touya has always been a good—if not patient—teacher.

“I meant it,” Touya says in a rush, hands flat on his thighs.

Shindou rolls his eyes and uncovers his goke. “You mean everything you do,” he says, “that’s one of the creepiest things about you.”

Touya looks up, eyes burning, mouth open ready for a fight, but Shindou adds as casually as possible, “So I figure I have to mean it, too, right? It’s only fair that way.”

Touya looks faint. “Right.”

Shindou grins and closes his hand around a fistful of go stones, dropping them then to the surface of the go board he’d stolen from his grandfather, sold to Touya’s dad, and played on at least once a week now. He tries not to think about strange journeys or how cool it is going to be to strip Touya out of those perfectly starched shirts and lick his neck, grind their hips together and make Touya whimper and pant.

Shindou says, “Nigiri” and Touya places two stones on the goban, and from his vantage point it feels like another in a long line of meaningful signs, so Shindou pushes the goban out from between them and leans over to kiss Touya again.

The kiss is still weird and a little awkward but much nicer, and Shindou can feel Touya’s mouth opening beneath his, like morning or Pandora’s box, and he feels a corner of the goban digging into his side, and wonders how this all happened for the briefest of moments, before Touya bites Shindou’s mouth, and all of it shatters out of importance.

**4\. “HOUSE FOR SALE: A beautiful, traditional residence, numerous south-facing windows and wonderful light. Up for immediate sale, all reasonable offers will be considered, to schedule an appointment, call…”**

Touya Akira is a quiet, obedient child, and grows to be a successful, well-liked adult, if regarded by most of his colleagues as a little bit cold. He stopped going to school when he was twelve and plays Go professionally—he’s very good and very ruthless, but there’s no fight in his game, only carefully navigated, seamless avoidance, division, conquest. Touya has never faced battle, nor an opponent who wants it quite as much as he does.

Kuwabara-sensei, who utterly refuses to die and therefore does terrible things to Ogata-san’s blood pressure, says this makes Touya, who is a rising star of the Go world, totally useless. Touya, who thinks that Kuwabara-sensei should have curled up and rotted years ago tries to ignore this, but mostly he worries that the old bastard may be right.

But his many achievements contradict this, and even if it is a mounting, slighting suggestion that refuses to leave him, Touya thinks that it must be wrong.

When he’s twenty-four, he hears about a house four neighborhoods away from his own that is beautiful and suddenly empty, and goes after an appropriate length of research to inquire about it. He finds that it is beautifully-kept and obviously well-loved, and the woman who is packing up the house likes Touya, and takes him around the many rooms, shows him the garden.

“My father-in-law was never quite the same after his nephew died,” the woman says thoughtfully, and adds, “he’d been sick off and on and when he died last month, his widow said she didn’t want the house anymore.” She waves around the room. “Too empty.”

Touya does not tell her he plans on living in it alone.

But he likes the rooms, he likes the sun, and he likes the peace that spreads its white fingers over the grounds and buys it under the auspices of parents who seem to think that this is a sign that he will be marrying soon. Touya doesn’t have the heart to explain that he’s married to his game.

It’s only several months later when he finally gets around to investigating the storage on the property that he finds the Go board—and a wallet.

The board makes its way into the back room of Touya’s house, because there is something very sad about it, and when he presses Go stones to the surface, they seem to resonate differently. He does, occasionally, stop by the mostly-unused study to press his hands to the surface, and wonders what battles were fought over it, and what happened, to give the board all its strange and inexplicable shadows.

The wallet contains just over one thousand yen, a subway pass, a bus fare card, a frequent visitor card for what must be a local arcade, and a membership card to the karaoke place on the edge of Shibuya Touya swears was shut down a few years ago. All of it looks very old. There is also a student identification card for Haze Junior High School, with an overexposed photograph of a young boy with bright blond bangs and an even brighter smile. Touya finds that he smiles back, though he can’t imagine what a middle-schooler was doing in his storage shed, and folds the wallet closed again. The back of the ID card reveals that it belongs to a boy in a family who lives forty-seven minutes and a transfer station away, Touya picks a quiet Sunday to slip the wallet into a bag and walk to the nearest subway station. Traffic is light and he makes it there without any incident.

And when a woman opens the door, with the sort of patched-together smile of somebody who’s lost something, Touya feels a shiver down his spine, like maybe he never should have come here.

“Is this the Shindou residence?” he asks first, cautiously.

She blinks, and the sad expression disappears long enough for her to say, “Ah—yes, can I help you?”

“Sorry for bothering you,” Touya starts politely, “but I was cleaning out my storage shed and I found this—” he holds out the bag “—and thought your son might want it back.”

The woman stares at his outstretched hand like Touya is reaching bloody fingers at her, and she says, “You bought my father’s house, then.”

Touya blinks. “I’m sorry?”

She forces a smile to her face. “Ah, sorry. My sister-in-law told me that my father’s house was sold to a young Go player, I assume that’s you?”

Touya smiles politely back and says, “Yes—I’m Touya Akira.”

“Come in,” she invites, and steps away from the door, but she doesn’t touch the wallet, and all the pieces click into place suddenly and Touya knows why with a painful lurch of certainty.

“Oh—I didn’t—I hadn’t—I’m sorry!” he starts, because though he’s good in polite society and around men three times his age in tension-filled rooms for championship games, he’s always been just a little bit socially-retarded.

“I didn’t—I’m sorry,” he repeats, and the look at the woman’s face when she turns back to him tells him that she knows he is.

“It’s all right, Touya-san,” she says gently. “Come in.”

All he sees as he steps over the threshold and into the house is all its gloomy corners, the pristine if painful edges, and wonders what happened to the boy with the golden hair and smile, and how he could have been so foolish just as he thinks that maybe she’s been looking for her son’s wallet, for anything of his she can still have.

She pours him tea and says thank you for bringing it and then looks out a window and murmurs, “He fell down the stairs.”

Touya blanches. “I’m sorry,” he says again, though he knows it’s useless.

She shrugs. “Something frightened him—his friend was with him—she said he saw something on a Go board my father had, and that it’d frightened him, and he fell down the stairs.” She laughed a little, with the lilt of a lonely mother, and murmured, “He broke his collar bone three times in two years. He got hit by a car when he was in the second grade. He was always cut up from soccer—but he was always fine. So when I heard that he’d fallen down the stairs, I didn’t think anything was wrong.”

By the time Touya gets home an hour and a half later, he’s finally feeling all the ramifications of what have happened banging around his chest, and by the time it’s three AM, Touya finds himself sitting in front of the Go board, palms flat on its surface.

He runs his fingers down all the familiar grooves and sits there until dawn breaks, rosy over the Tokyo skyline and feels his whole body ache. He wants something, feels responsible for some reason, and has this uncomfortable feeling that he and fate have just crossed paths and he’s only noticed it two blocks further down the street.

In the end, he settles for picking up the Go board and lugging it toward a sunnier front room of the large house—and perhaps it’s the exact angle of the morning light, but he thinks he sees the darkened edges of a red stain on the wooden grain of the board.

**5\. The Regional Youth Soccer Tournament will be held next week, starting with elimination rounds and ending three weeks from Monday. Musashi no Mori is, as usual, the perennial favorite for the trophy, but local sources reveal that Kaio is the heavy underdog bet this season.**

“Every inch of my body hurts,” Shindou whines.

He is sprawled out on the tatami of Touya’s room, and Touya cannot help but grin at the way his friend is complaining, because there is nothing in the darkened tan of Shindou’s skin or the new way his eyes shine that says anything of discomfort at all.

“I’m sure it was awful,” Touya agrees pleasantly, and contemplates his next move against an invisible opponent on the other side of the Go board.

Shindou rolls over onto his stomach and says, “The space between my eyes hurts, Touya.”

Touya cocks an eyebrow. “You spent the whole week before he went away for the soccer camp swearing up and down that you were so good at soccer you didn’t even care if you got picked for the regional team and you’ve spent the whole week afterward with a huge, stupid smile on your face complaining about how terrible it was.” Shindou blushes. “You liked it.”

“Especially that part where I fell down a lot,” Shindou mutters.

“I told you to play Go,” Touya says distractedly. “You’d limp a lot less.”

It’s an old argument. Shindou does not think this is true, and for him, it probably isn’t. Touya has never known anybody to be so terrible at sitting seiza in his entire life. When Touya-Meijin had invited all of Touya’s friends to a beautiful traditional Japanese restaurant for dinner in celebration of Touya passing the pro exams, Shindou had cracked up the entire table wailing about a charley horse barely two courses in.

Touya had yelled, suddenly furious, “You’re so stupid! Why didn’t you just excuse yourself and stretch out your leg?” And Shindou, clutching his calf had wailed, “Who’s stupid?” and they’d revealed themselves for the middle schoolers they had been back then, and sniped at each other all the way through the rest of the dinner, Touya and Shindou’s parents laughing at them from the sidelines.

When they’d first met, Shindou had been the scholarship kid, the one who had half the school whispering on the first day, recruited by Kaio’s sports department for his right foot and who looked nothing like the focused, hardworking athlete that Touya knows is underneath those bleached bangs. Shindou talked too much and made stupid jokes and has never figured out the randy ones; he is terrible at history and strangely gifted in math and can do figures in his head like somebody with an eidetic memory. He’s too open and forgiving and sat behind Touya, from that very first day, and leaps without a second thought straight into danger.

Which is why during gym the first week of classes when Touya found himself trapped by one of the scowling members of an intimidated Go team, Shindou felt compelled to take the boys’ activity for the day to the next level, and launch a dodge ball at the back of the offender’s head.

Several very violent moments later, Shindou jogged over, sidestepping his groaning victims while Touya just gaped, grinned brightly and asked, “Are you okay?”

Which Touya never got to answer because Shindou was immediately dragged off by the assistant principal and was trailed by a pleading soccer coach, begging for leniency.

Later, when Touya awkwardly thanked Shindou at the end of school for his help, Shindou had dismissed it and said with open curiosity, “So you’re the kid, right? You’re the kid who plays Go professionally?”

Touya had tensed, waiting for the jokes to come or for stupid questions, but Shindou had settled for saying, “My grandfather loves that game. He tried to teach me years ago but I never really got into it—what do you like about it so much?”

“What do you like so much about soccer?” Touya had snapped back.

“Hm,” Shindou had said thoughtfully, changing into his sneakers at his shoe locker. “I guess I get it, sort of.” He’d winked. “Maybe you can teach me sometime.”

Touya is sure that Shindou meant it as a joke when he first said it, but it’s hard to be Touya’s friend without knowing Touya’s Go, and Shindou had seemed interested in taking the time to know Touya—much to both of their surprise. Shindou said that he was envious of how serious Touya was, how fearless he was, and he’d sobered then, over the steaming bowl of ramen at the stand he’d bullied Touya into visiting one afternoon, and said, “I want to be like you—take stuff seriously, you know? I’m going to do that for soccer.”

Touya doesn’t know, outside of that first meeting, why exactly he and Shindou became friends. They share no common interests and fight with each other all the time, but he likes the way everything is black and white for Shindou, like Touya’s Go, which Shindou only makes fun of a little but actually respects a lot.

So when Shindou sneered and said, “I can’t believe you get to quit school for such a nancy game,” Touya interpreted it as regret that they would no longer be classmates.

Touya said back, “I can’t believe you’re too dumb to pass history on your own,” because he would miss Shindou, too.

Now, they are older and (maybe) wiser, or at least better at their respective obsessions, even though Shindou has more scars to prove it. The late afternoon sun is slanting through Touya’s room and Shindou has made himself comfortable on the floor, chattering excitedly about every interminable aspect of being one of being the starting forward on the regional team, about how much he hurt from too many practices, about how cool the coaches were, about this kid named Kazamatsui Shou and some guy named Shige and Musashi no Mori and how much Shindou hates assholes who think they’re better than other people.

It’s only fair, Touya thinks painfully, trying to lay out this game and failing miserably, given that Shindou had (mostly) patiently listened to Touya after the Hokuto cup about how much he didn’t get Waya and how Yong-he was an asshole and how he hated publicity and reporters and answering questions and how he could never sleep well in bad hotel rooms.

“And then there was this kid named Fuwa who came up to me on some kind of freak dare or something and—”

They are, slowly and imperceptibly, growing apart, because there was a time long ago when Touya understood at least half of what Shindou was talking about, and how he is lucky if he gets ten percent. The truth is that it’s strange they’ve been as good friends as they have given their very different lives and very different fates.

It’s a thought that has been rattling around in Touya’s head for the last few months, making itself present more and more the less he sees Shindou. It makes something in him ache, constrict, hurt; it makes something in him frantic and brave and frightened, near wild enough to make an insane move, like the one he pulled on Ogata-sensei in their match last week. The one which earned him a raised eyebrow mid-way through the game.

But Shindou and Touya don’t speak the same language, and even if Shindou is as simple as Touya’s black and white Go pieces, both rearrange themselves in infinite variation.

This game, like all the others, will end and when all the points are counted up Touya has no idea who will win or lose or miss the other more, and he is not intending on rushing it; they are not meant to be, but Touya is in no rush to embrace fate. Touya is losing his best friend.

It seems unfair that because they do not share a great love, they cannot share anything at all, but Touya knows better than anybody else Go is his path, and Shindou—

“—was the best game I’ve ever played,” Shindou said, dreamy.

And Shindou has his.

**6\. TOKYO (AP) — A world-renowned amateur Go player known only by his web handle, NOBU, has been the word on everybody’s lips at this month’s Amateur Go Tournament, held in Tokyo for the thirteenth straight year. Professionals from dozens of countries and amateurs from around the world have arrived at the competition with one goal in mind: discovering the true identity of NOBU.**

Touya knows Sai well enough to know that he won’t be at the tournament, that public displays that aren’t scripted in the elegant black and white words of a game of Go are outside of his interest. He knows that Shindou, with his curious gray eyes and curiouser, dim expression have more to do than any amateur tournament, and Touya has seen Sai, shadows of him, in Shindou’s game and on Shindou’s face.

So while the entire international Go community is watching the amateur tournament Touya pulls on his shoes and walks to the subway stop, rides down to the edge of Shibuya, where there is a tiny, disreputable arcade where Shindou will be playing an incredibly violent space game in the back corner. For as long as Touya has known Shindou, Shindou has hidden here.

“How can you stand this place?” Touya had yelled at Shindou once, following him—”Stalking me,” Shindou argued—into the arcade. “I can’t even hear myself think!”

“Exactly!” Shindou had bellowed over the raucous noises of the arcade, and there had been something in his voice that wasn’t truly flippant.

But Touya had always seen something in Shindou that made Touya frightened for him, little razor edges that seemed to rip at him and sooth him alternately. Shindou’s Go was dangerous and silky, sensual, too old for his too young face, just right for his eyes, and Touya had passing nightmarish questions, sometimes, about how Shindou had turned into a frightened man stuck in a boy’s body but knew better than to ask.

Shindou has his ghosts, always has, and they were not kind.

Today, like always, Shindou is in the back of the arcade, but there’s something manic in him, shaky, unfocused, like he’s vibrating so fast he’s going to come out of his skin. His eyes are almost silvery and they’re rimmed in red like he hasn’t slept in ages and spent all that time crying. His lips are thin and white and his hands cannot hold still, lack their usual grace. He is hunched and his game score is higher than ever. Touya sees the image of Icarus at the moment of pinnacle before descent, but the panic in Shindou’s eyes speaks of somebody pushing him up, up, up against his will, toward a boiling and merciless sun.

Touya knows now that when it comes to times like this he can’t get Shindou’s attention by yelling, but he can’t touch him, either, not on the shoulder, not on the arm, not anywhere. Shindou holds a deep, impenetrable space around himself like a cloak and the last time Touya had laid his hand on Shindou’s elbow Shindou had thrown himself back, half-wailed, and stared at Touya shaking with huge eyes.

So Touya just watches the too-thin line of Shindou’s back, the sweat on the back of Shindou’s neck where strands of his hair stick to his skin. The blond in his bangs is gone now, and Touya remembers the first time he ever saw Shindou, that shock of bleached hair and the look in now-familiar gray eyes that said, “Help me, help me, help me,” but all Touya’s ever known is Go, and so they had played, Touya watching Shindou’s shaking, untrained fingers, his darting eyes, the way he flinched, just before he made a move, leaned away from his right side.

Shindou was small then, eleven years old, and by the time he’d turned fourteen Touya had seen other things, rosy bruises on his neck, a slick, unnatural sensuality that shook people where they stood, that had made Ogata-sensei rock back on his heels for a moment, astounded and shocked, flushing hot at the way Shindou had licked his mouth, let his eyes go heavy and inviting. Shindou’s sixteen now and seems to have gotten over the worst of…whatever it was, but Touya’s not immune, never was, and is still driven to distraction, even if he sort of thinks he knows why Shindou can’t let anybody touch him unless they’re going to fuck him, why he’s so goddamn good at Go and bad at everything else.

Touya’s not stupid and he has an internet connection, and he knows what abuse looks like now, sees it across a Go board all the time and he has to fight a wave of nausea thinking about how Shindou had been fifteen years old before he’d stopped flinching. Touya hopes whoever did it died, a million horrible, unending deaths—when he’s not furious at himself for not telling anybody.

But Shindou’s voice had broken then, when Touya had seen a self-inflicted cut on the underside of his arm during one of their screaming matches and had been so terrified and sick that he’d been storming out of the Go salon to tell his father. Shindou’s voice had broken when he’d all but fallen to his knees and said, “Don’t tell. Please don’t tell anybody. Nobody will believe me and I’ll get sent away—please, Touya,” and Touya hadn’t had the heart to do anything but stand there until he could breathe again.

Touya loves Shindou, like a friend and like a odalisk and like a mystery, one he wants to unravel with clever, soft hands, but he wonders know with all Shindou’s cracks and tears and an ocean of hurt inside if Shindou will ever tell Touya where to start, allow him to break their inertia. Or will they be like their Go, asymptotic, traveling infinitely closer but never reaching.

So Touya watches Shindou, like he’s always watched Shindou, and waits until Shindou’s knees nearly give out on him and he turns back to catch Touya’s expression.

They walk out of the arcade and into the noisy evening, and don’t say a word as they wander up and down the streets and sideways until they reach the Touya Go Salon and sit in their traditional spots in the back of the salon, where it is quiet and there are shadows from the fishtank on the wood of the Go board, shimmering ribbons of haunted blue light.

They are deep in their third game, and the Go salon is mostly deserted, when Shindou suddenly says in a brittle voice:

“Thanks for not telling anybody.”

Touya misplaces a white Go stone, but manages to say, “I—yes.”

Shindou smiles, and it’s a small, angry thing. “It’s not actually what you think, what you thought,” he says philosophically. “Nobody touched me.”

“Then how do you—” Touya starts furiously, thinking about the bruises, the scratches, the way Shindou’s mouth would be swollen when he showed up at games, too young to know all the things that he knew, and sat across from Touya with an easy, sexual grace, eyes drowsy.

“Nobody ever touched me against my will,” Shindou corrects, and then stumbles on the words, pausing and averting his eyes, saying, “There are things worse than touching.”

Touya doesn’t know what they are and never wants to learn. He wants to go back into time and break his own wrists for being too scared to say anything, for wanting to ignore Shindou’s living hell, for wanting Shindou’s Go more than he wanted Shindou, for not knowing what this was, in all its bitter, dangerous complexity. He wants more than anything though, to make this not have happened.

“You ever watch Casper?” Shindou says again, suddenly, his eyes far away. “You know, with that stupid, fuzzy ghost thing?”

Touya opened his mouth to say ‘no,’ but what did it matter, and shut his mouth with a click.

It takes time, and a long, long breath outward, before Shindou says, his chin falling to his chest, “Nobody has to touch you to hurt you.”

Shindou presses a black stone to the board, with a learned grace. Touya wonders now at what price it came, and watches Shindou’s hand as it comes away from the board, as he murmurs, “And not all ghosts are good.”


End file.
